Randy Sparacino's campaign is choking on corporate PAC money.
Jeff Golden should welcome every mailer and TV ad Sparacino runs.
One cannot spend a million dollars of other people's money in a media market this small and not look like a tool of the people paying the bills.I expect to vote for Democratic State Senator Jeff Golden, not Republican Sparacino. I voted for Sparacino for Medford mayor, but I am disappointed in his campaign for state senate. He is playing footsie with the election-denying wing of his party. I also think abortion should remain available in Oregon and if Republicans get a majority they are pledged to outlaw it.
I freely give advice to Sparacino's campaign anyway. They won't believe me and won't change, so it is harmless. Here is the advice: Stop. Stop taking $100,000 dollars a week from PACs to spend on your advertising. Your ads are sinking your campaign. They have the wrong message.
The intended message of Sparacino's ads is that Jeff Golden is a terrible, disgusting Democratic bad guy, and that Sparacino is the alternative. They follow the pattern of all attack ads, with ugly black and white photos of the opponent and creepy music.
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| TV ad |
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| From a Sparacino mailer |
Since Sparacino's ads have a hard partisan edge, they motivate Democrats. The ads turn off people of all persuasions who dislike nasty partisanship. The vote going to independent Betsy Johnson's campaign for governor shows there are a lot of people who appreciate feisty independence. Sparacino's ads work in the opposite direction. They diminish Sparacino. They confirm him as passenger on a luxurious Republican steamroller, a bad image in most districts, including this one. If you begin to forget or doubt that this is Sparacino's role, another ad will soon remind you.
Sparacino's ads have a losing message, and his own campaign is paying to spread it! Golden should rejoice every time another ad appears.
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5 comments:
The second image could be of Sparacino sending a million dollars of media overkill up in smoke. Why not spend it on services for the homeless in downtown Medford, Mayor?
Shameless!
It's an interesting comparison/contrast between these new anti-Golden ads and the negative personal ads from his race against Jessica Gomez four years ago, which as I recall tried to smear Golden not only with bad-faith reference to the memoir but to his first marriage as well.
Is there a difference--in campaign authorization--between attack ads which mention the opponent in small print at the end ("Paid For by Friends of...", e.g.), or not at all ("Paid For by Oregonians..."), versus these new ads, which end with a shot of Sparacino himself, nodding?
Once again, though, sorry, but it's insufficient in 2022 for middle-aged/elderly white progressives to declare Nothing To See Here on the racism front. Folks here are in denial about today's strict-liability fault standard. It's effect on the credentialed auditor, not speaker intent.
White leftist professors, for example, with otherwise impeccable ant-racist credentials, have been disciplined or even fired simply for using the n-word out loud, for pedagogical purposes, in unquestioned disfavor, but within the earshot of black students who took offense at the mere utterance.
I too completely absolve Golden and reject what I call slime from Sparacino and/or his sponsors, for the reasons specified. But I don't have credentialed leftist standing either. Once again, let's have the take of prominent area black residents on the post-modern meaning of "racism".
According to Sparacino’s website: “Our founding principles are under attack, and he will work to ensure our rights are not infringed upon.”
He should be more specific because that sounds anti-Republican. If he supports the founding principle of a peaceful transfer of power, our right to free and fair elections or women’s reproductive rights, he should say so because they are under attack – by Republicans. Considering all his PAC money, it’s more likely that he’s talking about the right of industries to continue spewing greenhouse gases and poisoning our land, air and water.
Peter Sage to LD
It would not be fair to blame Golden for the worst excesses of a vigilante culture that backdates history. I have never heard him do any such thing.
I agree that "presentism" has become crazy-excessive and essentially disrespectful to our past. I say this as a person old enough to have experienced some of the past. I wish there were courageous old people--and professional historians--standing up and saying to stop. We are no more moral than our parents and grandparents. We live in our own eras.
We are also going through a phase, I think. And hope. The phase is to assume excessive delicacy. The trigger warning is supposedly a sign of care and respect. It is in fact, I think, a sign of condescension and excessive squeamishness. I am hopeful we will shortly look back at it the way we look at the victorian practice of putting little cloth covers on the legs of chairs, less people be offended by the risquê sight of a chair or table leg. Golden's response was him trying to feel his way, dealing with the mores of this era.
For fun, and as an exercise in empathy, how about LD (or others) draft a better response than the one he wrote, which I quote in full last week when I responded to the original GOP attack. He acknowledge the new "rules of the road" but didn't capitulate to the idea that he was, in fact, in error. I think Golden handled it well. Give it a try. Send it to me. One or more of them would be interesting guest posts. Oh--submissions might be one of two kinds. Type one is to send the correct response, using your own name and identifiable information. Type two is to do it anonymously.
Peter Sage
This is not to defend Jeff Golden. Everybody knows that allegations of racism against him are totally spurious. He used the n- word in the context of quoting others. It’s been in common usage for hundreds of years. Attempts to ban its use, even in a historical context, is no different than the attempts to ban teaching our history of racial oppression. What are we going to do, ban Mark Twain and James Baldwin? How about “Blazing Saddles” while we’re at it. Good grief!
It sounds like some people are going mighty far out of their way to be offended, whether it's the woke or the anti-woke.
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